The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an
indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with
vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any
of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower
floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty
shelves, five long shelves per side, cover
all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from
floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free
sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery,
identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of
the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may
sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities.
Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally
and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a
mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually
infer from this mirror that the Library is not
infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to
dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite...
Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of
lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The
light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have
wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues;
now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to
die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I
am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the
railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink
endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall,
which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists
argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute
space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a
triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics
claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber
containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and
which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony
is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it
suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is
a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose
circumference is inaccessible.

There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf
contains thirty-two books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred
and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty
letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the
spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know
that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before
summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic
projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to
recall a few axioms.

First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose
immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be
placed in doubt by
any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the
product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its
elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of
inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated
librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance
between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these
crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover
of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate,
perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.

Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number1.
This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate
a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem
which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost
all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit
fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely
repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much
consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the
next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids. This much is
already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement,
there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and
incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians
repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning
in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or
in the chaotic lines of one's palm... They admit that the inventors
of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but
maintain that this application is accidental and that the books
signify nothing in themselves.
This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)

For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books
corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the most
ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different
from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right
the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is
incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and
ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot
correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary
it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following
one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not
the one the same series may have in another position on another
page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of
cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though
not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators.

Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon2 came upon a
book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages
of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who
told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were
Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic
Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections.
The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative
analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited
repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of
genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker
observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be,
are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the
comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a
fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there
are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible
premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves
register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd
orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is
not infinite). Everything: the minutely detailed history of the
future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of
the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the
demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration
of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of
Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the
commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the
translation of every book
in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the
first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt
themselves to be
the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal
or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some
hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped
the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said
about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which
vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and
retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy
abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways,
urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These
pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses,
strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive
books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar
fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad...
The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of
the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the
searchers did not
remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or
some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.

At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity's
basic mysteries -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be
found. It is verisimilar that these grave mysteries could be
explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not
sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the
unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars.
For four centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons... There are
official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the
performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired
from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost
killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs;
sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it,
looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover
anything.

As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive
depression. The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held
precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible,
seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect suggested that the
searches should cease and that all men should juggle letters and
symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance,
these canonical books. The authorities were obliged to issue severe
orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old
men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with
some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine
disorder.

Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate
useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials which
were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole
shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless
perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those
who deplore the "treasures" destroyed by this frenzy neglect two
notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of
human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique,
irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand
imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a
comma. Counter to general opinion, I venture to suppose that the
consequences of the Purifiers' depredations have been exaggerated by
the horror these fanatics produced. They were urged on by the
delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books
whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and
magical.

We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man
of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must
exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest:
some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. In
the language of this zone vestiges of this remote functionary's cult
still persist. Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they
have exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate
the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed
a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which
indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book C,
and so on to infinity... In adventures such as these, I have
squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that
there is a total book on some shelf of the universe3;
I pray to the unknown gods that a man -- just one, even though it
were thousands of years ago! -- may have examined and read it. If
honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for
others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be
outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be
justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the
reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost
miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the "feverish Library
whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into
others and affirm, negate
and confuse everything like a delirious divinity". These words,
which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously
prove their authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In
truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations
permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a
single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that
the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is
entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster
Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at
first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a
cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is
verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I
cannot combine some characters

dhcmrlchtdj

which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its
secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can
articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear,
which is not, in one
of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall
into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one
of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable
hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An n number of
possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the
symbol library allows the correct definition a
ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library
is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these
seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are
You sure of understanding my language?)

The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state
of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or
turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men
prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a
barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single
letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which
inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population.
I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the
years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect
that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be
extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary,
infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes,
useless, incorruptible, secret.

I have just written the word "infinite". I have not interpolated
this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not
illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to
be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and
stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is
absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the
possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to
suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is
unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross
it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same
volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated,
would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this
elegant hope4.

1941, Mar della Plata

1 The original manuscript does not contain digits or capital letters. The
punctuation has been limited to the comma and the period. These two
signs, the space and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the
twenty-five symbols considered sufficient by this unknown author. [Editor's note.]

2 Before,
there was a man for every three hexagons. Suicide and pulmonary
diseases have destroyed that proportion. A memory of unspeakable
melancholy: at times I have traveled for many nights through
corridors and along polished stairways without finding a single
librarian.

3 I repeat:
it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the
impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder,
although no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and demonstrate this
possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a
ladder.

4 Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library
is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be
sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type,
containing an infinite number if infinitely thin leaves. (In the early
seventeenth century, Cavalieri said that all solid bodies are the
superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) The handling of this silky vade mecum
would not be convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other analogous
ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse.